“That I like,” I admitted. “I don’t want to go around killing innocent people. I’m not some sick fuck.”
A smile twitched under the mustache, which itself stayed steady. “Good. You seem already to understand the basic tenet of this business, and of your craft- these individuals we target are…well, let me back up: we do not target them. Others target them, and once these individuals have been targeted, they are already dead. They are obituaries waiting to be written. We have nothing to do with their deaths, other than the trivial detail of how those deaths are carried out.”
“Because these are inevitable deaths,” I said.
A crisp nod. “Correct. These are terminal cases before we ever get on the scene. You’re a surgeon removing a tumor.”
“I just won’t have much of a recovery rate.”
That made him smile a little. “Not true-those whose lives our targets afflicted will be free from their misery. Our clients are the patients in this medical metaphor, not the targets, who would in this case be the tumors.”
“I get it,” I said. “I did okay in English.”
Did I mention he was a pretentious windbag?
“Normally, you would go in for the last few days of surveillance, and be briefed in person and in detail by your partner, who would remain to provide back-up in the event something might go less than smoothly.”
“By goes less than smoothly, you mean, gets fucked up.”
“Yes. But as I say, we have a flawless record.”
I sipped Coke. Studied him. “Only on this job, this first job, I go in alone?”
He nodded. “We’ve had a man on the scene for over a month-he’ll have left by the time you get there. You don’t have any plans for Christmas, do you?”
“Just singing carols at orphanages and old folks homes, why?”
As if I hadn’t been kidding, he said, “But you’ll be free on the day after?”
“Yeah. I should have all my good works polished off by then.”
His eyes seemed sleepy suddenly, half-lidded, though his tone was crisp, the mellow baritone taking on an edge: “You’ll go in on the twenty-sixth. Don’t drive your own vehicle. Never drive your own vehicle, always rent. You’ll fly out of Chicago.”
I was pouring myself more Coca-Cola. “You said this was complex. What’s complex about it?”
A jaw muscle twitched. “You have to do more than just eliminate the target.”
“Isn’t that enough?”
“Normally. But in this instance, the target has made a real nuisance of himself. You’ll need to find some documents.”
“And deliver them to you?”
“No, destroy them. You can burn them in the fireplace of the cottage where your target lives.”
“Good thing it’s the day after Christmas, then.”
“Oh?”
I grinned at him. “Would hate to singe Santa.”
He just looked at me. Then he smiled, big, taking the mustache along for the ride this time. “Very droll, Quarry,” he said. “Very droll.”
“That’s what it said in my high school yearbook, Broker-Most Likely to Be Droll. Now, who do I have to kill?”
THREE
That first night camped out in the split-level turned into morning-three in the morning, actually-before I decided that my non-Mouseketeer Annette would be spending the night in the cobblestone cottage with her favorite professor, tuckered out after her oral exams.
I admit that I had considered several scenarios designed to bring this assignment to its desired conclusion and right away. None of these, however, suited the Broker’s mandate of care and caution, and mostly included me going over there and somehow dealing non-violently (or anyway non-fatally) with the brunette, and then snuffing the prof, finding the manuscript pages Broker wanted destroyed, destroying them, and heading back to the lake and my A-frame to wait for money and praise to arrive from the Broker.
Some of these scenarios were pretty fanciful, involving chloroforming the girl (where would I get that stuff, exactly-a heist at the University hospital?) or knocking her out gently, like they do on TV, only in real-life that kind of blow kills you half the time. Pretty much all of these idiot plans had me shooting the prof multiple times, watching him shake, rattle and roll in Wild Bunch slow motion while I grinned maniacally. Somehow this didn’t seem in line with the Broker’s low-key wishes.
What was my problem, anyway?
What was the philandering Byron to me? Why did I care how many coeds blew and/or boffed him? I was generally in favor of girls blowing and boffing guys, although old farts like the prof (fucker was pushing forty) getting blown and boffed by young girls made me a little queasy, admittedly. I mean, there are limits.
So part of why I threw in the towel at three a.m. on my first stakeout was a sense that I needed rest and refreshment of my faculties, and anyway I did not want to fall asleep in this cold house where my pants could catch fire being too close to the space heater while the rest of me froze its nuts off.
By three-thirty I was in my Holiday Inn Room all snuggled up in my wee little bed. I didn’t need a lot of sleep and woke up around eight-thirty a.m. The window view told me that snow had fallen during my slumber and the world was a winter wonderland out there, thick fluffy stuff and evergreen trees plump with white, but the plows had been out, so you could go and enjoy Jack Frost’s handiwork without winding up dead in a ditch.
I showered, threw on a sweater and jeans and went down for breakfast. The motel was pretty dead-this was the Sunday after Christmas and the usual businessman clientele were not on the road and the other guests seemed to be made up of family members who were overflow from the homes of relatives who’d run out of spare rooms.
That meant that later, around ten, when I went down for a swim, I had to share the chlorine-scented echo chamber with squealing, splashing kids, whose shrill glee would have sent a guy with a hangover looking for a drill press to squash his head in. But I didn’t have a hangover, or a drill press for that matter, and anyway didn’t hate children any more than the next guy, so I settled into the whirlpool bath and let the hot, churning water soothe me.
A woman who presumably was the mother of at least one or two of the eight or nine turning the swimming pool room into a combination day care center and horror show padded over in a bright orange one-piece swimsuit. She’d put on a little weight having kiddies, but there was no doubt why somebody had wanted to have kiddies with her in the first place-she was a redhead with an Afro-ish tower of permed but tousled hair and a roundish pleasant face and displayed the kind of curvy frame that makes you really lenient about cellulite.
She settled in across from me. In ten years, she wouldn’t rate a second look. But right now the way her full breasts hit the top of the water and the crinkles around her dark blue eyes as she smiled at the pleasure the water jet at her back was giving her was giving me a hard on. The hard on was safely beneath the water, not causing anybody any trouble, not even me, but I wondered what the hell was wrong with my ass. A woman almost ten years older than me, tending her kiddies at a pool, had my dick throbbing.
I was supposed to be in control. Last night, or early this morning I guess would be more accurate, I had considered wild scenarios that had me behaving like a lunatic in carrying out a job that required cautious planning and detached professionalism. What the fuck was wrong with me?
The bubbling water and the kiddie shrieks played like dissonant modern music as I sat there with my arms winged on the concrete lip of the whirlpool, smiling at the redheaded mom, whose posture mirrored mine.
“Have a nice Christmas?” she asked.